Computers

Google’s vice president of Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer, talked to VentureBeat about social search. She first gives a real-word example:

<<Social search happens every day. When you ask a friend “what movies are good to go see?” or “where should we go to dinner?”, you are doing a verbal social search. You’re trying to leverage that social connection to try and get a piece of information that would be better than what you’d come up with on your own.>>

(I think she’s still speaking about humans there.) Besides features like Google Co-op or something like “other users like you also searched for,” she later goes on to give an example of how something like this might work out in web search:

<<For example, it’s clear that people would attribute more authority to the pages that their friends have visited. So if we took Web History and allowed that data to influence rankings, such that pages that your friends have visited were now bumped up in your search ranking, that that might be a good augmentation to something like personalized search. In essence, it’s a fusion of personalized and social search. In this case, what we would do is say: This Gmail account which maps to Marissa Mayer then maps to these other friends, allow those friends to influence this ranking>>

Marissa adds that “no, we have not done anything like that to date.”

Asked about the future of search, Marissa argues that it’s hard to imagine data like “who your friends are, what you like to do, where you are” will not be used by search engines ten years from now.

[Thanks Search-Engines-Web.com!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Social Search: Results Influenced By Friends | Comments]

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OpenID has been getting a lot of press lately. Part of this attention is everyone wishes that OpenID becomes the solution to our online identity management problem. After all, no one likes creating more accounts when there could be a single sign on identification system. The good news is you may already have an OpenID if you use some of the popular online services. The bad news is not everyone has embraced this URL based identity system.

From an interview Fortune did with the Google co-founders and the company’s CEO:

<<Will you all work at Google for the rest of your careers?

Eric Schmidt: We agreed to work together for how long, gentlemen?

Sergey Brin: Twenty years.

Really? When did you make that agreement?

Schmidt: Two years, seven months, and four days ago. But who’s counting? Actually, we agreed the month before we went public that we would work together for 20 years. I will be 69, and according to Google I’m going to live to 84, so I should be fine.>>

Also from CNN/ Fortune comes a portrait of 10 different Google employees, including Andew Maxwell, Dylan Casey, Wei-Hwa Huang, Marcus Mitchell and Dora Hsu.

[Thanks Brinke!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: The Google Bosses' 20-Years Pact | Comments]

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Yes, this ad I saw in Gmail made me click. It led to an Excite.com search result for the word “vogue” plus a word consisting of the letter “w” repeated 564 times. Exciting indeed – and we need to remember here that someone, somewhere, pays Google money for that click. (On the other hand, less whacky ads I rarely notice in Gmail!)

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Weird Excite AdWords | Comments]

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Michael Quinion is a former BBC radio reporter and the author of the book “Port Out, Starboard Home: The Fascinating Stories We Tell About the Words We Use” (see US version). He has a keen interest in etymology, the study of the origin of words. Michael’s following text from his website, which appears in similar form in the book, tries tracing the origin of the word “gadget” (used with permission).

This takes me back. As a callow young broadcaster, I was sent one day to a small village behind Brighton to talk to an old man who for many years had been Rudyard Kipling’s chauffeur. Among many other things, but for no good reason that I can now recall, he told me with great emphasis that Kipling had invented the word gadget about the year 1904.

I now know better. However, his assertion isn’t wholly wide of the truth, since Kipling did to some extent popularise it, in his Traffics and Discoveries of 1904: “Steam gadgets always take him that way”. There’s evidence, though, that the word had by then been around for many years, most probably among seafarers. Kipling may have picked it up during one of his journeys to India.

The seafaring origin confirms that a story often told in the US is also false. This holds that gadget comes from a Frenchman named Gaget who was involved with the construction of the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France in 1886. He was said to have sold miniature bronze versions of it in New York, each with his name on the bottom. Everybody wanted one of these Gagets and a new word was invented. That’s a nice try, but no cigar. The name of Gaget is indeed associated with the construction of the statue, since the workshop in Paris that created the copper outer skin of the monument was that of Gaget, Gauthier & Cie. And miniatures of the statue were sold, though none with his name on them, so far as I know. But otherwise, the story is false, not least because gadget – despite Kipling’s book – was not widely known until after World War I.

We now think of a gadget as being some small mechanical device, ill-defined perhaps, but certainly ingenious or novel. The evidence suggests that it was originally one of those hand-waving terms for something one temporarily can’t remember the technical name for – a thingummy, a whatsit, a what’s-his-name, a doohickey or dingus. There is anecdotal evidence, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, for this sense having been around since the 1850s.

The origin is rather obscure, but a plausible suggestion is that it comes from French gâchette, a lock mechanism, or from the French dialect word gagée for a tool.

The writer who put gadget on the written map was one Robert Brown, whose Spunyarn and Spindrift, A sailor boy’s log of a voyage out and home in a China tea-clipper appeared in 1886. He wrote: “Then the names of all the other things on board a ship! I don’t know half of them yet; even the sailors forget at times, and if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken-fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom – just pro tem., you know”.

[By Michael Quinion | Origin: Where Did the Word "Gadget" Come From? | Comments]

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